Body & Soul (26 page)

At school he did almost everything he had to do right there on the premises. He would come early or stay late if necessary, adjusting his schedule to maintain the compartments. His high grades he took as a confirmation of this strategy.

Thus he became uncomfortable when Satterthwaite's twelve-tone challenge began to leak out of the compartment of school and into the rest of his life. He found himself playing Schönberg on the Bechstein, listening to Schönberg on the phonograph, and studying scores in an increasingly tense state of frustration tinged with fear. He understood the mathematical and structural nature of the work, but that was all he understood. He was not learning to hear in a new way, and if there was music in there, he was missing it. He said nothing about this for months, until one morning when Weisfeld asked an innocuous question about school.

"I should have skipped Satterthwaite's Music Three," the boy said.

"Really?" Weisfeld raised his eyebrows. "Why is that?"

"It's all twelve-tone." Claude looked down. "The other kid is a math whiz, and he loves it, can't get enough of it. I hate it. It's driving me crazy."

"Why?"

"It doesn't seem to matter what it sounds like. I mean, they don't really seem to care. It's all just structure. I don't even bother to play the stuff I hand in. I write it out in study hall and don't even try to hear it in my head."

"Which would be difficult in any case," Weisfeld said. "Satterthwaite admires Schönberg?"

"Schönberg is God."

"A certain amount of talk about purity?"

"All the time. And the word 'free,' he uses that a lot and gets excited."

"I see." Weisfeld watched the boy for a moment and then stared upward, beginning the slow stroking of his mustache that he did, unconsciously, when he was thinking. Claude knew when to remain silent. The thinking on this occasion went on for an unusually long time. Finally Weisfeld got up and said, "Let's go downstairs."

When they reached the basement Weisfeld turned with a smile. "Remember Fuchs? Counterpoint when you were just a little squirt?"

"It was fun."

"You got all hot—I remember it, your face actually turned red when you weren't allowed to use parallel fifths. Boy oh boy, you were steamed. 'Why not? Why not?' you'd asked. You loved the sound of them."

"But you explained it. It made sense. Give up that sound and the lines will fit better, and you get other sounds."

"Let me see something you've done in twelve-tone." Weisfeld went to the piano.

Claude went to his worktable, rummaged around, and came back with a single sheet of music. "It's awful," he said.

Weisfeld held the paper in his hand and studied it for several minutes. He traced each bar with his fingertip, occasionally giving a small nod or a barely audible grunt. Then he put the paper on the music stand and looked at it for another moment. "This is not awful. That little rhythmic figure in the second bar, the way you fool around with it here and spread it out over all of this. And then backwards. That's clever, doing it with the rhythms as well as with the notes. What's the tempo? You haven't marked it."

"I don't know. Allegro, I guess."

Weisfeld leaned forward, put his hands on the keyboard, and launched into the piece, playing firmly. As the motive was developed, dissonances flew left and right, thick as firecrackers at Chinese New Year, and the piece moved forward without a tonal center, without any home base, making Claude feel slightly queasy. All it had, as Weisfeld finished, was an odd kind of lilt, like a cross between a waltz and a march. To Claude's ear it didn't really end, it just stopped.

"So," Weisfeld said. "Not bad. Runs out of gas, sort of, but not bad at all."

Claude pulled out the chair from his worktable and sat down. "I just don't get it."

"It's inventive. You follow the rules. You're thinking."

"But it doesn't sound like anything!" Claude sounded like a child—ready, almost, to cry. "It's all over the place. I can't control it. I'm not
allowed
to control it." He slumped forward, looking at the floor, his head in his hands.

" Ahh," Weisfeld sighed, as if the boy had said something important.

"What do you mean, ahh?" Claude asked wearily. "I don't know what you mean."

"It's all right." Weisfeld got up. "Go to school now, before you're late. Let me think about this and tonight we'll have a talk. We'll close early and take a walk in the park. Okay?"

Claude nodded.

The very fact that he'd mentioned the matter to Weisfeld made Claude feel a good deal better. At school that day—it was a Thursday and he did not have Satterthwaite—he'd even cracked a joke in American history. A rather slyly delivered pun on 'seamen' and 'semen,' which everyone got immediately, had even won a grudging guffaw from the teacher.

Weisfeld surprised him by closing the store almost as soon as Claude got back. The boy couldn't remember the last time he'd closed early. They walked to the park in a comfortable silence and made their way to the gravel path around the reservoir.

"You're not a kid anymore," Weisfeld said, walking slowly with his hands behind his back. "You're on your way to becoming a well-educated young man, and we're getting into deep stuff here. I can't just
tell
you, you know what I mean? So I'm going to ramble. My thoughts. Maybe right maybe wrong. Maybe useful maybe not. I've been thinking about it all day because I know this music makes you uneasy. It maybe even scares you a little. That is understandable, but unnecessary, really. Unnecessary."

Some people rode by on the horse path. Then a young woman, dressed as if for a fox hunt in an English movie, walked along leading her horse by its bridle. Every now and then she'd turn her head and speak angrily to the animal.

"Satterthwaite says it's the future of music," Claude said.

"With all due respect," Weisfeld said, "nobody knows the future. Not about music, not about anything. All we can do is guess, believe me." He stared at the water through the chain-link fence, his small feet making soft crunching noises as he walked.

"People are attracted to systems. It's human nature. They're always looking for systems, hunting them down, thinking them up. Not just about music, about everything. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's not so good."

"Like what?"

"You've heard of Karl Marx?"

"Communism."

"Right. But not at first. A brilliant man. Reads everything—economics, history, anthropology, philosophy, everything. A moral man too. He wants to make things better. So he creates a system. I mean an intellectual system, an analytical system, like a tool you can use. He covers everything, the system can explain everything in economics, all you have to do is look it up. People start to build on it, develop it and so forth, and what do you get? Where do you end up?" He paused and shot Claude a glance. "You get Stalin, that's who you get. One of the greatest monsters of all time."

"But didn't he help beat Hitler?"

"So? Two monsters fighting. Plus, in the beginning they played footsie. But let's get back to the question of systems. That's what I want you to think about. The urge to make systems. Mr. Schönberg is not alone, I can tell you."

"Is his system good or bad?" Claude asked.

"Wait. It isn't that easy. You think if it was that easy I wouldn't tell you right away?"

"Sorry."

"Now for a good system you could say the evolution of scientific method. Do they talk about that in school? Scientific method?"

"I've heard it," Claude said, wishing Ivan was with him.

"Beautiful stuff. You've got the experiment, it has to have a control. You've got Ockham's razor—if there's two answers, you take the simple one. Other stuff, but in general it's a system and it works. Human knowledge about science is expanding so fast it's exploding, practically. So that looks like a good system. You don't get Hitler or Stalin, you get penicillin."

"But music
has
a system," Claude said. "You taught it to me. It
has
a system."

Weisfeld nodded. "Very good. A very good point." He raised a finger in the air and then reclasped his hands behind his back. "Almost always a new system takes the place of an older one. Once they thought earth, air, fire, and water, that's it, that's everything. But it couldn't hold, so eventually it's carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and so on. Chemistry. Once they thought God made everything in seven days and there it was, man, the animals, fixed, unchanging, forever. But
it
couldn't hold, so eventually it's Darwin, evolution, and the survival of the fittest. You see?"

"Newton couldn't hold," Claude said, "so then there's relativity."

Weisfeld stopped walking. "Exactly! This you learned, I presume, from your friend Ivan."

"He's trying to understand it. Space bending. Time changing with speed, all that stuff."

"He mentioned it." Weisfeld began walking again. "A nice young man. A very lively mind."

Claude experienced a guilty twinge of jealousy, but only for a second. Ivan could not, after all, play the piano. Moreover, Claude was proud of Ivan, proud to have him as a friend, and therefore proud that Weisfeld thought highly of him. As they walked along the northern rim
of the reservoir Claude felt a sudden wave of love for Weisfeld, a kind of melting sensation in his chest. He moved closer, and Weisfeld, without breaking stride and in the most natural way, took his arm.

"Can tonality hold?" Weisfeld said. "That's something to think about. Is it really a prison, or is there plenty of room left? Is Schönberg jumping the gun? Is the new system really bigger and better, or is it, in the end, smaller and worse. Will it go anywhere? These are things to think about."

"But what do
you
think? That's what I want to know."

"What I think doesn't matter so much. I'm not the one who has to deal with it. You are. The new generation. You have to find the answers inside yourself. And don't be hasty. Remember, almost all the young composers are writing twelve-tone. Almost everybody."

They walked in silence for a while as Claude thought about it. "Maybe they're just trying it out," he said finally.

"Perhaps. And that might not be such a bad idea."

"You mean—"

"Don't be afraid of it. Learn it. Work hard. Do it seriously and try to get what you can out of it. Keep an open mind, and if in the end you decide to throw it away, you'll be doing it from strength."

"Oh, God," Claude sighed.

"One thing I'm sure of.
Play the pieces.
Play what you write, on the piano, and listen hard. So it's weird. Who cares? Listen as hard as you can to the new sounds, even if you don't think you're controlling them, which seems to bother you so much. Concentrate. You might begin to hear more"—he searched for the word—"more widely. Maybe, as good as your ear is, who's to say, maybe, under pressure, you'll hear more deeply a little bit? Is that possible?"

Claude looked ahead and realized with surprise that they had gone all the way around the reservoir. Weisfeld stopped at the path from which they had entered. "Okay?" he asked.

"Okay." Claude nodded, slowly kicking a stone. "But it won't be easy."

"So what else is new?" Weisfeld said. "You want easy? Play the ukulele."

In fact, almost immediately it became less difficult. Because of Weisfeld's words Claude was able to stop fighting with himself. Satterthwaite's messianic certitude no longer seemed threatening, only eccentric, and the boy, who had once been worried that twelve-tone was what he had to get
to,
now understood it as something to get
through.
It made all the difference. He pushed himself, working late into the night, motivated now by the idea that once he had thoroughly explored the system, he would be free to move beyond it. This was an act of faith, since he did not know what, if anything, lay beyond it. He found himself increasingly interested in structure, caught up in a growing awareness of ever-widening, seemingly limitless structural possibilities. He wrote piece after piece, trying each time for a new architecture, a new form. He became mildly obsessed with metrical and rhythmic effects, overlapping time signatures, jazz beats, Latin syncopations, and the uses of silence. In the absence of harmony, he paid attention to texture in the abstract. He created patterns with dynamics, with hand-plucked strings, pedal technique, and anything else he could think of.

And he listened. He composed mostly at the worktable, popping over to the Bechstein now and then to see if something was physically playable or to check a motive or a rhythm figure. But when he had a piece written to his satisfaction he would take it to the piano and play it—at first very slowly, often so slowly as to be out of tempo—and listen with all the concentration he could muster. He felt oddly passive, hearing his own work as if from a distance. The strange sounds contained in a progression of unrelated intervals. The eerie, dense chords, like black stones in a Zen garden. Notes skittering in all directions. Everything up in the air without a net.

Sometimes, even with a purely atonal piece, he could hear fragments of some unwritten, hallucinatory, tonal substructure running along underneath, as if played by a string section of ghosts. When this happened—and it was always by chance, beyond his control—he became excited, carried away with an only slightly guilty pleasure. Once he played such a section for Satterthwaite and asked him if he heard anything else behind the stated sounds.

"Like what?"

"Oh, I don't know," the boy said. "Sometimes I hear chords when there aren't any chords. In my head, I mean. Like there, bars twenty-three to twenty-six."

"Play it," Satterthwaite said, bending his head to take his brow in his hand.

Claude played the four bars.

Satterthwaite lifted his shiny face. "I hear only the notes."

"Okay."

"If you are hearing something more," Satterthwaite said tentatively, "it's probably your brain trying to pull it into tonality. Disregard it. You are doing wonderful work, young man. Very pure, very adept. Stay on the high path. Don't be sucked down, even in your head."